NBA gets MLK Day right, but still denies Grizzlies more national TV time

Zach Randolph became a beloved Grizzly – and a beloved Memphian – during his time in the Bluff City from 2009 until this year when he left for the Sacramento Kings. But when he first joined the Grizzlies he had a troubled history. Here’s a look at some incidents of Z-Bo’s pre-Memphis days.
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My now-annual Pick-and-Pop Consumer’s Guide to the Grizzlies Home Schedule™ will follow later today or tomorrow morning (probably tomorrow morning) with game-by-game notes on the home slate from a purely entertainment perspective. But, for now, a few general observations on the Grizzlies 2017-2018 schedule, which was released last night:

I never much liked the noon tip MLK Day games we’ve tended to have in recent years, shoved over onto NBATV, a channel I don’t even have and I’m an NBA junkie. It was a token, allowing people to trumpet an MLK Day game in Memphis without otherwise engaging in the day in a significant way. Ideally, the Grizzlies showcase should be the MLK holiday after party of sorts, not the structuring event. It should be where the city comes together, in person or via their televisions, after a day filled with good words and good deeds. The Memphis temples that should be in the spotlight on MLK Day are Mason and Clayborn, not FedExForum.

And, so, last year, I did not share the local outrage over the game moving from a barely seen, day-disrupting MLK Day matinee to a true national television showcase the night before, as a kind of preamble to the day. (Though the real outrage was that the Grizzlies franchise had to fight to even have this option.) To me, that was better.

But this is best: A late-afternoon true national television tip against a high-profile opponent as a kind of culminating civic event, after a day dedicated to things greater than basketball, is exactly what this game should be. Kudos to the NBA for doing the right thing on the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination. But I wouldn’t expect a repeat in 2019.

For what it’s worth, Atlanta should also have a primetime MLK Day game, but perhaps they don’t care enough about it to lobby as hard. (Plus, putting the Hawks on national TV this season is a particularly heavy lift.)

Elsewhere: New Orleans is a pretty snazzy opening night opponent. Golden State and Minnesota, two of the most fetching teams in the association, each only come to FedExForum once. This is good from a competitive standpoint, but a bit of a bummer from an entertainment standpoint. Competitively, though, schedules are schedules. There’s not much variance. The Grizzlies have a hard one because they’re a mid-tier team in the tougher conference. They’re middle of the pack in total travel because their central location is mitigated by being one of the easternmost Western Conference teams. They have a couple more back-to-backs than the average this season. They close with a road-heavy stretch against a lot of other presumed Western playoff contenders. Depending on how the season breaks, that could be a hurdle.

The second biggest takeaway, though, after the MLK Day correction, is probably going to be the general lack of true national television games. The Grizzlies have three (I’m not counting NBATV here), with a January home game against the Wizards and an April road game against the Pellies in New Orleans, both on ESPN.

This is slim, and puts the Grizzlies near the bottom of the exposure rankings based on last year’s success:

But it’s not surprising. Three teams (Atlanta, Brooklyn, Orlando, two of those in pretty major markets) got shutout. Two others (Indiana, Chicago, one ditto) are only scheduled once. Memphis has always been one of the NBA’s smaller markets and has always lacked what the rest of the country considers a true star. But the team’s placement in this company is a reminder that, this season, the Grizzlies will quite likely not enter the year as a consensus projected playoff team.

Finally Jeff Davis: For a while now, official civic opposition to the Nathan Bedford Forrest and and Jefferson Davis statues in city parks have been conflated, but while the City Council had long ago taken official action on Forrest, it hasn’t been clear that the city had done anything official in regard to attempting to remove the Davis statue from former Confederate Park.

That (finally) changed yesterday, when City Attorney Bruce McMullen announced the city would file a request for a waiver from the Tennessee Historical Commission to remove the monument to the former Confederate president, joining the request already in place to move the Forrest monument. Now, these two efforts can officially move forward in concert.

It’s about time. I’ve always felt that the Davis statue was the more transparently offensive display, lacking any significant connection to Memphis history or the complication of a gravesite, and never understood why it was so often ignored by officials and activists both. I’ve written about this on and off for years. In 2015, when then-Mayor A C Wharton prompted action on the Forrest statue, I wrote this in questioning why Davis still wasn’t part of the conversation:

The former Confederate Park was intended for the worthwhile purpose of commemorating the 1862 Naval Battle of Memphis, which was swiftly won by the Union, which then occupied the city for the remainder of the war. The park space atop the bluff is a spot where citizens gathered to watch the battle. That’s real history, but the name “Confederate Park” didn’t convey it. As with Forrest Park, it conveyed the Jim Crow-era attitudes of 1908, when the park was dedicated. Similarly, the Jefferson Davis statue at the center of the park has little to do with the history that took place there. Davis may have been President of the Confederacy and may have spent a few uneventful years in Memphis later in life, but his statue, erected in 1964 and labeling the secessionist leader “a true American patriot,” reflects the segregationist defiance of those who put it there. It’s not a statement in favor of history but against the civil rights movement.

Iconography of Confederate soldiers and leaders may have a place, but those places are in cemeteries, battlefields, and museums, and even then context and presentation matters. It’s not on pedestals in public parks.

That said, and because I’ve long been an on-the-record proponent of removing the Forrest and Davis statues in Memphis, I should also say that I don’t endorse of the toppling of the Confederate statue in Durham, North Carolina, last night or the apparent (though it’s not apparent how serious) attempt to do the same with the Forrest statue in Memphis that followed. These monuments should be taken down by their communities, through the political process and as a certified community decision, in concert with a serious treatment of the history most of these monuments were erected to distort. It shouldn’t be done through acts of vigilante destruction, however well-meaning.

Good Reads: This column has been doing a pretty weak job lately of collating other good reads relating to Memphis. We’ll try to do better. But here’s a recommendation of two recent reads The 9:01 was late to, but hopefully you haven’t missed: Geoff Calkins tells the story of the Orpheum Theatre going above and beyond to create a special experience for a 6-year-old blind girl visiting from Jackson, Mississippi. And in last week’s Memphis Flyer cover story, Chris McCoy tells the story of Alyssa Moore, the young Memphis woman who survived when an ex-boyfriend set himself on fire in here presence at Murphy’s earlier this year.

Happening in Memphis Today: It’s a big night on Elvis Presley Boulevard tonight, as the annual Candlelight Vigil commemorates the 40th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. But changes to the event have made it a little harder for impulse attendees who want to follow the full procession to the gravesite. The street scene, though, should still be open. I’ll probably be down there.

The Fadeout: Buddy Holly’s classic song about the release of the NBA schedule and the two-month countdown to opening night:

Reach Chris Herrington at chris.herrington@commercialappeal.com or on Twitter at @chrisherrington and @herringtonNBA.